Career

Worked for
Science
magazine; worked at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science; sold his first story to
Essence,
1975; columnist and proofreader for
Tax Notes,
1990-2002; author, 1992—; guest instructor at George Washington
University, University of Maryland, and Princeton University, 2000s.

Awards:
National Book Foundation Award, for
Lost in the City
, 1992; Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, for
Lost in the City
, 1992; grant, Lannan Foundation; grant, National Endowment for the Arts;
National Book Critics Circle for
The Known World,
2004; Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for
The Known World,
2004.

Sidelights

In 1992 Edward P. Jones burst on the literary scene with his much-hailed
collection of short stories called
Lost in the City,
which was nominated for a National Book Award. Then after a decade-long
silence, Jones published his first novel,
The Known World
. Initially catching reviewers' attention for its

Edward P Jones

unusual subject matter—the ownership of slaves by a black master
in the antebellum South—the novel soon demonstrated its literary
qualities as well. Reviewers lauded Jones for the novel's epic
grandeur, vernacular, and lyrical prose, fully realized characters, and
lively dialogue. Comparing Jones favorably with William Faulkner and Toni
Morrison, several critics went so far as to dub Jones a major new force in
Southern writing. For his novel
The Known World,
Jones won the Pulitzer Prize.

Edward Paul Jones was born on October 5, 1950, in Arlington, Virginia. The
only son of an illiterate hotel maid and kitchen worker, Jones grew up in
his mother's sphere because his father had drifted out of his life
when he was a preschooler. After attending Catholic school for
kindergarten and part of first grade, Jones was educated in Washington
public schools. His interest in literature was sparked early, yet it was
some time before he realized that African Americans, like their white
counterparts, were writing works of literary merit. "I always loved
reading," Jones recalled to Robert Fleming of
Publishers Weekly
. Comic books formed the mainstay of his reading until as a 13 year old,
he discovered novels. "When I started reading black writers, I
discovered two books that had a great impact on me: Ethel Waters'
His Eye Is on the Sparrow
and Richard Wright's
Native Son
. I felt as if they were talking
to me, since both books had people in them that I knew in my own life. I
was shocked to learn black people could write such things."

On a scholarship, Jones studied at Holy Cross College, in Worcester,
Massachusetts. Many writers begin writing seriously during their college
years, and Jones was no exception, writing his first fiction during his
sophomore year. Although a professor encouraged his efforts, Jones did not
consider writing as a possible career then, or even after his graduation
in 1972, when he returned to Washington, D.C. Living with his terminally
ill mother, he worked in various positions, including a stint with
Science
magazine. Once upon reading a short story in his sister's copy of
Essence
, Jones decided he could write better stories, and during the after-work
hours at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he typed
them up. In 1975 he sold his first story to
Essence
at a particularly difficult time in his life—after his
mother's death and when he was between jobs and living in a city
mission.

After reading
Dubliners,
a collection of short stories by James Joyce, Jones decided to give
Washington, D.C., a similar treatment with
Lost in the City.
As he told Carole Burns in an interview for the
Washington Post,
"I went away to college and people have a very narrow idea of what
Washington is like. They don't know that it's a place of
neighborhoods, for example, and I set out to give a better picture of what
the city is like—the other city." While working at various
jobs and attending graduate school at the University of Virginia, Jones
wrote these realistic and personal stories over a period of three years,
although he had been thinking about them for years before then. He wanted
each story to be unique in its characters and situations, rather than
linked to each other. "Every major character, and even most minor
characters, would be different, so that each story would be distinct from
the others," he recalled to Lawrence P. Jackson of
African American Review
. "I didn't want someone to come along and be able to say
that the stories are taken out of the same bag. I suppose that is one of
the reasons that it has taken me so long."

With stories bearing such titles as "The First Day," about a
girl's first day of kindergarten, "The Girl Who Raised
Pigeons," about a girl's relationship with her birds,
"The Store," which tells of a man who tries to make a
success of a neighborhood grocery, "His Mother's
House," which recounts how a mother takes care of a home her son
has bought by selling crack, and "Young Lions," about the
criminal element in the District of Columbia, Jones clearly showed his
talent. Although only one story, "The First Day," has a
clearly autobiographical element, the others recapture the life Jones knew
growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the rich vernacular of his
mother and her associates. "I remember black people's poetic
language," he told
African American Review
's Jackson. "Over years and years you absorb all of this
stuff." Yet, according to Jones, writers must use such language
judiciously: "I grew up with this wonderful way of talking. One of
the things I remember about reading Zora Neale Hurston was that in certain
novels you hear it too much. If you have lines like that in every
paragraph, it's too rich."

Even the city itself, with its palpable presence, plays a
character's role in the stories. As the title indicates, some of
the characters in these stories become lost, engulfed in the city, while
others "eventually find their way a bit." For these
"insightful portraits" and "unsensationalized
depictions of horrifying social ills," to quote a
Publishers Weekly
critic, Jones earned a National Book Award nomination.

Even with the prestigious nomination to his name, Jones struggled to earn
a living, and when a steady, if dry, job presented itself, he did not
refuse. For more than a decade Jones, a confirmed bachelor who has never
owned a car, worked full time as a freelance columnist and proofreader for
Tax Notes,
a newsletter for tax professionals. It was tedious work and thus left
room for his imagination to wander to other topics. After publishing his
short story collection, Jones had pondered his subjects for future pieces.
He had even bought and read portions of more than a dozen books on
slavery. However, it was an obscure fact that remained with him since his
college days that charged his imagination—the fact that some free
blacks had become slaveowners. Yet because he was not planning to become a
writer at that time, he had mentally filed away this information.

Finally Jones let his imagination run free and started mentally plotting
in intricate detail the story of Henry Townsend, a Virginia slave who buys
his freedom and then becomes a slave owner himself. However, this novel,
told in omniscient point of view and in a nonlinear form, is more than the
tale of Townsend. Townsend is the pivotal character around which the
stories of myriad other characters revolve. In concrete terms, there is no
main character in
The Known World
. Yet in the abstract, the reader may consider the inhumane institution of
slavery to be the novel's central "character."
Structurally
The Known World
recalls
Lost in the City
because in both works various characters gather to tell a number of tales
and consider the repercussions on the lives of those people somehow
involved.

When Jones started writing
The Known World
after being laid off from
Tax Notes
in 2002, he began with the 12 pages he had at one time written down. He
believed that he was writing a short story and was unaware that he was
going to write a novel until he did. As Jones explained in a Bookbrowse
interview, the novel's structure developed as he committed it to
paper: "I always thought I had a linear story. Something happened
between the time I began the real work in January [of] 2002 of taking it
all out of my head and when I finished months later. It might be that
because I, as the 'god' of the people in the book, could see
their first days and their last days and all that was in between, and
those people did not have linear lives as I saw all that they had
lived." Compared with the years he had spent plotting the novel in
his head, the actual writing of
The Known World
required a very short time, a mere two and a half months. After the work
had been accepted for publication, Jones again spent that much time
shortening it at the publisher's request.

When it rolled off presses in 2003,
The Known World
quickly earned accolades from reviewers. Critics praised Jones for his
use of language, well-drawn characterizations, and historical accuracy,
nominating the novel for a National Book Award. While some readers may be
drawn to the novel for the "hook" of its unusual subject
matter, Jones did not have an agenda, an intent to say something
particular about race. Rather, "It's about a person deciding
to control another," he explained to the
Washington Post
's Burns. "If someone reading it goes into it they'll
see that I'm just not stuck on that topic. There are other things
going on. There are relationships among people, of various kinds."
Jones worked diligently to avoid creating stereotypical characters, a
quality of the work that was not lost on reviewers.

Like he had in
Lost in the City,
Jones employed the colorful language that is a heritage of black
Americans. He also enlivened the narrative with hints of humor and
superstitions of his forebears. And although he wrote of some horrific
events about slavery, he was able to remain emotionally detached from them
because he had dealt with them during the novel's lengthy gestation
period. "I had enough time to come to grips with what was going to
be in the novel, so it didn't have that kind of immediacy,"
Jones told Edward Guthmann of the
San Francisco Chronicle
. This detachment is evident in Jones' narration, noted
Washington Post Book World
reviewer Jonathan Yardley: "The pace of the novel is leisurely and
measured, and Jones' lovely but unobtrusive prose is tuned
accordingly." It is this "patient, insistent, sometimes
softly sardonic, always wise" narrative thread that entices the
reader to turn the next page, and the next.

While one reviewer pointed out several errors in fact in
The Known World
, many cited the work's verisimilitude as one of its strengths,
praising Jones for his copious research. For his part, Jones admitted that
the novel's setting, the fictional Manchester County, Virginia, is
just that—fictional—and that his research efforts were
limited. Originally he had planned to visit Lynchburg, Virginia.
"But I never got around to going down there, and so I was forced to
create my own place," he told the
San Francisco Chronicle
's Guthmann. "One can pick at its [the novel's] small
faults without detracting from its overall importance," remarked
Claude Crowley in a Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service review. What is the
work's importance? Although only the passage of time will provide
the ultimate answer,
Washington Post Book World
's Yardley concluded: "Jones has woven nothing less than a
tapestry of slavery, an artifact as vast and complex as anything to be
found in the [world-famous French museum, the] Louvre. Every thread is
perfectly in place, every thread connects with every other. The first
paragraph connects, nearly 400 pages later, with the last. Against all the
evidence to the contrary that American fiction has given us over the past
quarter-century,
The Known World
affirms that the novel does matter, that it can still speak to us as
nothing else can."

In 2004,
The Known World
won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle
Award for fiction. That same year, Jones was working on another anthology
of short fiction. Still intent on writing fiction "that
matters," he told
Publisher's Weekly
: "I want to write about the things which helped us to survive: the
love, grace, intelligence, and strength for us as a people."